GMO crops may cause major environmental risks, USDA admits

A new report published by the United States Department of Agriculture demonstrates that the vast majority of corn and soybean crops grown in America are genetically-engineered variants made to withstand certain conditions and chemicals.

But while GMO seeds have been sowed on US soil for 15 years now,
the latest USDA report reveals that Americans still have concerns
about consuming custom-made, laboratory-created products, albeit
nowhere near as much as in Europe.

The report was released by the USDA’s Economic Research
Service and published on their website Feb. 20. And though the
paper takes into consideration the trends that have shaped how
scientists and agriculturists have approached
genetically-modified organisms since they were first introduced
in the US a decade-and-a-half ago, the consensus seems to be that
no one is certain just yet about what toll the surge in GMOs will
truly have.

Between 1984 and 2002, the study’s authors wrote, the number of
GMO varieties approved by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health
Inspection Service, or APHIS, grew exponentially. Today GMO crops
are found in most of America’s biggest farms, they continued, and
scientists have in the last several years discovered
groundbreaking new ways to make situation-specific seeds that
have traits more desirable than traditional crops.

“As of September 2013, about 7,800 releases were approved for
GE corn, more than 2,200 for GE soybeans, more than 1,100 for GE
cotton and about 900 for GE potatoes,” the USDA affirmed.

Just last year, the agency added, GMO crops were planted on about
169 million acres of land in the US — or about half of all
farmland from coast-to-coast.

Around 93 percent of all soybean crops planted in the US last
year involved GMO, herbicide-tolerant (HT) variants, the USDA
acknowledged, and HT corn and HT cotton constituted about 85 and
82 percent of total acreage, respectively.

“HT crops are able to tolerate certain highly effective
herbicides, such as glyphosate, allowing adopters of these
varieties to control pervasive weeds more effectively,”
reads an excerpt from the USDA report.

As those weed-killers are dumped into more and more fields
containing HT crops, however, USDA experts say it could have a
major, as-yet-uncertain impact on the environment.

“Because glyphosate is significantly less toxic and less
persistent than traditional herbicides,” a portion of the
report reads, “…the net impact of HT crop adoption is an
improvement in environmental quality and a reduction in the
health risks associated with herbicide use (even if there are
slight increases in the total pounds of herbicide applied).
However, glyphosate resistance among weed populations in recent
years may have induced farmers to raise application rates .Thus,
weed resistance may be offsetting some of the economic and
environmental advantages of HT crop adoption regarding herbicide
use. Moreover, herbicide toxicity may soon be negatively affected
(compared to glyphosate) by the introduction (estimated for 2014)
of crops tolerant to the herbicides dicamba and 2,4-D.”

That chemical, as RT has reported on in the past, is a component in Agent
Orange and has been linked to health risks. Should the USDA give
the go-ahead for GMO companies to manufacture 2,4-D-resistant
crops, then that agent could appear in alarming numbers across
America’s farmland. But while anti-GMO advocates consider that
just one of the reasons they oppose the influx of man-made crops
being grown in exponentially large numbers across the county, the
USDA said activism along those lines has been comparatively small
in the US.

“Some consumers, including those in the European Union, have
indicated a reluctance to consume GE products. In other
countries, including the United States, expression of consumer
concern is less widespread,” the report reads.

“Despite the rapid increase in adoption rates for GE corn,
soybean, and cotton varieties by US farmers, some continue to
raise questions regarding the potential benefits and risks of GE
crops.”

But even if the jury is still out with regards to the risks of GE
crops, the USDA said they are being grown in record numbers, the
likes of which has prompted herbicide manufactures to experience
a surge as well. Whether that’s’ good or bad, however, has yet to
be determined.

"We are not characterizing them (GMO crops) as bad or good.
We are just providing information," Michael Livingston, a
government agricultural economist and one of the authors of the
report, told Reuters.

According to the report, herbicide use on GMO corn increased from
around 1.5 pounds per planted acre in 2001 to more than 2.0
pounds per planted acre in 2010.